In a series of papers Emanuel Schegloff (1987, 1989, 1991, 1992a, b, 1997) has developed
arguments concerning the coherence of analytic procedures for addressing entities that would
traditionally have been glossed as ‘social structure’ or ‘social context’. He argues that ‘social
context’ should be treated as relevant to analysis only insofar as it features as a participants’
concern; that is, only insofar as it is invoked, formulated, oriented to, or displayed in actual
interaction. Research conclusions should be disciplined by attending to the procedural
consequentiality of any claimed contextual particular.
This paper will briefly review Schegloff’s argument and pick out some themes that have been
highlighted by recent work in discursive psychology (Edwards and Potter, 1992, 1993;
Edwards, 1997; Potter, 1996). In particular, it will emphasise the way that cognition, in some
form or other, is often treated as a taken-for-granted background in discussions of context. In
effect, cognition is treated as the inner stuff of perception, storage and inferences and it is set
over against an outer reality of context, which might be events, settings and social structures.
However, that reality is typically seen as having its effect via its cognitive perception,
representations and processing. The paper will argue that cognition can be subject to some of
the same analytic moves as context and that, indeed, in participants’ discourse things that
analysts have traditionally glossed under the categories ‘cognition’ and ‘context’ often blur
together.
My suggestion is that ‘cognition’ and ‘reality’, conventionally the inner and the outer, can be
treated in the same way as things which are formulated, attended to, and oriented to in
discourse. In this way cognition becomes a topic of discursive study, but is respecified in the
process. In the title of a recent paper, Schegloff (1997) asks the rhetorical question Whose
Context? This highlights the questionable status of analysts versions of context vis a vis
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those of participants. My subtitle – Whose Cognition? – raises a parallel question with
respect to cognition.

Description:

This is an electronic version of an article published in POTTER, J., 1998. Cognition as context (whose cognition?). Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31 pp. 29 - 44. Research on Language and Social Interaction is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327973rlsi3101_2